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The new Columbus Africentric School scheduled to open on the East Side in early 2016 would have
the district’s biggest indoor sports venue, a 2,300-seat competition field house for the school’s
accomplished basketball teams.

“It will be the largest,” said Carole Olshavsky, the district’s facilities chief, after a
Columbus Board of Education meeting last night where the architectural plans were reviewed.

The field house will be so large that it will seat more than twice as many students as the
school is being designed to accommodate.

It’s planned to have four locker rooms, a weight room and a 94-foot basketball court, which is
the length of an NBA court and 10 feet longer than most high-school courts.

Because of its size, officials decided the field house shouldn’t be attached to the
139,460-square-foot school building, which will house 1,000 students in pre-K through high school.
A redesign by project architectural firm HKI Associates to separate them cost the district an
additional $177,000, but the total $39.3 million budget didn’t change.

“By separating it, the school functions appropriately as a school, but the competitions are
isolated,” Olshavsky said.

Separating it also will allow the field house to be used for special events, and it will be able
to host regional high-school basketball tournaments.

The field house will connect to a football-stadium complex designed to seat 1,500 home
spectators and 500 visitors. Surrounding the football field will be a 400-meter running track.

The 52-acre site also will have room for two outdoor baseball fields, large parking and bus
drop-off lots, and green space that could house geothermal heating and cooling wells.

The district acquired the land, the former site of the Woodland Meadows housing development near
Bexley, last summer from the city of Columbus. In return, the city took over the closed Reeb
Elementary School, 280 Reeb Ave., to develop into a South Side community center.

The current Africentric School, just south of Downtown near German Village, will be sold to
developers.

In other district business last night:

• The board agreed to pay two gifted-education teachers $45,000 each to settle a federal
racial-discrimination suit.

Elizabeth Gasior and Juli Knect said their boss, Toia Robinson, and others had retaliated
against them for voicing concerns about the gifted program and about the administrator’s treatment
of employees.

The teachers are white and Robinson is black. Robinson, who oversaw gifted education in Columbus
City Schools from 2009 until she resigned in July, now oversees gifted education in the Cleveland
Heights-University Heights school district.

• The district got $26,742 from an insurance policy for a loss that occurred when cash raised at
school events went missing. The policy, with Auto-Owners Insurance Co., covered the amount minus a
$1,000 deductible.

Last summer, a grand jury indicted former treasurer’s office employee Tina Dorsey, 43, of the
South Side, on a charge of theft in office. If convicted, she could get up to five years in
prison.